Okay, we're gonna next talk about customer archetypes. And the first thing we have to say about customer archetypes is there are not the same thing as a customer type. It's an unfortunate choice of terminology, but that's the way it is. A customer archetype is a typical member of a customer segment. So, "soccer moms" was a very famous customer archetype. They were high income, suburban women, with kids who played sports, who cared about getting to the next event and so on. Another famous archetype was "Joe the plumber" from a couple elections ago. Joe the plumber was the archetype of a typical voter segment, and he was a real person, so he was interviewed, but he was a specimen of this customer segment. He was a dissatisfied blue collar worker who was fair-minded but wanted his needs taken care of. The idea of a customer archetype is that you know the whole character. Once you have something personified as a soccer mom, you can ask questions like how would she find out about a new kind of school for her children? Well she might find that at a soccer game, etc, etc, etc. Joe the plumber, what would he think about a kind of beer that mixed wine taste and beer taste? I don't think Joe the plumber would like it. Because you have a picture of the character and it's a vivid, whole character picture. You can answer questions about them and the accuracy of your answers depends on how good your archetype is. But they can answer all the questions that a customer segment ask. What are their needs and wishes? What are their hopes and fears? How do they find out about things that might interest them or solve some of their problems? And how do they buy them? It's not the same thing as a customer type. A customer type, as we discussed, is a kind of role. It's a way people approach a buying decision in an ecosystem, so the end user is a different role than the recommender. Each of those guys, each of those people might actually have their own archetype. So the archetypal payor from purchasing is a flinty-eyed hard nose bean counter who everything is money to them. Scrooge would be a kind of archetype of the payer. The typical end user in a sporting event is a fan. So on and so forth. Every customer type has an archetype, but not every archetype is a different customer type. What are they good for? Why do you wanna have archetypes at all? Well being able to describe a customer archetype means that you understand a customer segment, and not being able to describe a customer archetype means there is still some stuff missing. So you say to yourself, okay, I feel like I understand the people who will buy my new mobile application. All right, tell me about them. What do they do for fun? Can you answer that? Okay. Well then you don't have a customer archetype and you don't have a picture of how that customer's gonna buy or decide. It solves business model problems, is the main reason why you care about an architect. It solves problems about value proposition. Would Joe the plumber like that? Eh, you know Joe the plumber values authenticity, he cares about that. This thing just won't seem authentic to him. It tells you about customer channels. She's gonna find out about it at the soccer game. It tells you about customer relationship. What you need to do in order to reach somebody with a product whose in this customer archetype. It has a revenue stream. How are they used to paying for things. Do they have a lot of money, do they have a little money, do they like to spend their money all at once and know that they own the thing? Do they do the math? Do they know how much the annual fee amounts to, so on and so forth? Archetypes help you solve business-model problems. So as you go through the customer discovery process, you're gonna have to find customer archetypes that are the image of a typical customer in a segment. You're gonna be asked to describe them before the customer segments that you're unearthing now, and my thesis is that you have a good understanding of a customer segment, if and only if, you can produce an archetype for it. They help you understand how your customers discover, want, buy and refer, and that's the key to the business model.
